Looks like the worst is over with little to show for it on the mountaintop we live on.
news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090628/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_honduras_referendum;_ylt=Au3sZbzYFMkZu3biXidWk6B0fNdF
Turns out President Zelaya hired a bunch of mercenaries/thugs to spark riots saying that they were the poor and supported the president. Hugo Chavez was funding the attempted communist takeover by supplying free oil/gas to Honduras. We were still paying more at the pump than Americans, but the money was going somewhere. Last night people began throwing Molotov Cocktails in the streets of the capital. These people were anything but poor. The poor live in the mountains without electricity and water, and therefore many of them have not even heard that their president was arrested.
We know poor families here. They do not believe their president has done anything to help them. If anything, his rein has hurt them. One of the women that works here had her electricity cut off recently because they could not pay the bill, which amounted to $50/month. She had only a single light bulb and a television. Neither of which was on constantly. To put it in perspective, if you had these two items turned on eight hours daily, it would cost you about $30.
I never really held anything against President Zelaya "Mel" until this. Living out in the mountains without television, he's just not a big factor in our lives. Yes, he was squeezing out the middle class by raising minimum wage 50% (thus reducing jobs), but the middle class is a tiny percent of the population here. We have a tiny percent of the population with most of the wealth and then we have the campesinos (peasants), not much in between. Mel was not for any of these people, but he tried to incite class warfare by blaming his plight on the rich bankers. He used funding from Venezuela to attempt an overthrow.
The way the supreme court, congress and military handled the situation was flawless. It smelled sweetly of at least former diplomatic training from American diplomats. The balance and separation of power found in a republic worked well. Thankfully, God was merciful to the nation of Honduras. There is a lot of paganism and religion here, yet we have a merciful God.